Television is the largest advertising medium in the United States, with over 65 billion dollars in advertising revenue in 2011. According to Nielsen, approximately 20 times more hours are spent viewing TV as compared to viewings on either the Internet or mobile video. In 2013, there were about twice as many original programs on TV as compared to 2005, and over 60% of viewers were using High Definition (“HD”) TVs.
If there is an area for improvement in TV, it is around how advertising can be effective and targeted to viewers. TV advertising is unlike online advertising because it has traditionally been a broadcast medium, i.e., a one way transmission of TV programs to the viewer with no direct feedback. In online advertising, it is possible to deliver ads to individual persons, via cookies and IP addresses, and to then track the behavior of those persons, including whether they convert after seeing the advertisement by observing their clicks on advertisements and conversions on web sites.
In TV, advertisements may be embedded in a single high definition video stream, and broadcast using over-the-air terrestrial transmission towers, satellite, and/or cable. The single signal transmission enables high bandwidth and very high quality TV signal. However, this introduces significant limitations. Apart from small experimental TV systems, there are currently no available technologies for delivering advertisements one-to-one to households at a scale equivalent to TV broadcasting.
A second major limitation is determining whether a purchase was influenced by the TV advertisement. Standard TV systems do not allow advertisers to know if individuals saw the advertisements. Further, standard TV systems cannot determine if an individual who is purchasing a product or service, saw the advertisement.
Because of these and other limitations, since the 1950s, this medium has been tracked using a 25,000 person, Nielsen “panel” with “diaries.” The individuals on Nielsen's panel could report on what they saw on TV, and then this data could be extrapolated across the United States (115,000,000 households). This panel is both small and yet expensive to maintain. However, in the United States, set top boxes (“STBs”) are now present in over 91.5% of US homes. Further, since 2009, STBs with return path capabilities have proliferated in the United States, comprising over 30% of STBs in households. The number of households with STBs is greater in size than the Nielsen panel, and the scale and richness of detail of STB data allows for new capabilities in TV advertisement targeting.
In order to utilize new capabilities, the present disclosure relates to systems and methods that use current U.S. data collection and U.S. TV broadcasting capabilities. As will be discussed in further detail below, the systems and methods discussed herein provide a framework for understanding certain TV targeting problems and approaches for solving them. Benefits of the present disclosure may include providing detailed descriptions of data formats available for television targeting; formalizing TV advertisement targeting problems into one or more objective functions; identifying variables available for advertisement targeting that can be used for targeting practical TV advertisement campaigns; providing a plurality of algorithms for TV data; and combining the plurality of algorithms to provide desired results.